Shahid King Bolsen shared a link.

Posted on by Shahid Bolsen

I do not know who this brother is, and I don’t mean to pick on him; but what he is saying is representative of others with the same argument. It is a con game. I don’t know if this brother is a con man himself, or he has just been conned, and so became another conduit for the fraud to spread.

“We have our own political system in Islam, it is called Khilafah; we are Muslims, and we should have Khilafah.”

Except, no.

We have rules, but we do not have a specific system for implementing those rules. I don’t know if he is talking about the Muslim empires of the past, or he is talking about how we will “rule the world” in the future with our “Islamic political system”. As for the past, what we had were kings for 1,400 years who stayed in power until they died. We had absolute rulers who had a group of advisers with whom they held consultation. That is called an authoritarian dictatorship, and it is not a particularly unique model, nor one explicitly mandated by the religion; nor is it a system most of us would welcome, particularly since that is basically what we have now anyway in most of our countries.

If you want to say that Khilafah means a ruler selected by the elites of society, instead of by the general population; well, that is basically the political system everywhere. The key difference being that in our “Islamic system” the ruler would stay for life.

The fact is that none of these people can elaborate on what they think this “system” is; and they can’t because there is no system. Even the title “Khalifah” and the term “Khilafah” appear in hadiths only according to their linguistic meaning; whoever takes authority after whoever preceded him; it does not refer to a political model. If there was a model mandated by the Qur’an and Sunnah, we would have that clearly explained: what is the process for selection, what are the branches of government, how are responsibilities and authority distributed, what are the exact requirements for any and all officeholders, what are the different departments of the government, so on and so on. Of course, we do not have any of that.

The Sahabah organized political authority according to what worked best for implementing the rules of Islam at that time and place; they were, and understood that they were, free to create their own political models in whatever way they deemed most effective. And we are also free to do so, and we should know that we are free to do so


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